Dr. Pyro wrote:Reminds me of a playa story. I was in the men's urinals (you know, the JOTS at the end that have just troughs on three sides) and there were about six of us taking a piss. One of the guys shouts out, "Tell a joke!" To which I piped in and said: "A baby harp seal walks into a club." There was about three seconds of silence, then one guy began to giggle, then the next, and within the next 10 seconds guys were peeing all over the walls. Thank God our camp has a shower.

*wiping fucking tea off keyboard*

hahaa. oh, Doc, that was a good one........hahaa,

you know, to never offer to shake hands, with a guy when he's peeing, right?

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)

Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s.

Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor. Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC.

Seeking to give her son structure, his mother enrolled him at 6 in the Italian Boy Scouts. It was there, Mr. Fairfax said, that he acquired his love of nature — and his determination to bend it to his will.

On a camping trip when he was 9, John concluded a fight with another boy by filching the scoutmaster’s pistol and shooting up the campsite. No one was injured, but his scouting career was over.

His parents’ marriage dissolved soon afterward, and he moved with his mother to Buenos Aires. A bright, impassioned dreamer, he devoured tales of adventure, including an account of the voyage of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo, Norwegians who in 1896 were the first to row across the Atlantic. John vowed that he would one day make the crossing alone.

At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected.

He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.

In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills.

When piracy lost its luster, he gave his boss the slip and fetched up in 1960s London, at loose ends. He revived his boyhood dream of crossing the ocean and, since his pirate duties had entailed no rowing, he began to train.

He rowed daily on the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Barely more than half a mile long, it was about one eight-thousandth the width of the Atlantic, but it would do.

On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Fairfax pushed off from the Canary Islands, bound for Florida. His 22-foot craft, the Britannia, was the Rolls-Royce of rowboats: made of mahogany, it had been created for the voyage by the eminent English boat designer Uffa Fox. It was self-righting, self-bailing and partly covered.

Aboard were provisions (Spam, oatmeal, brandy); water; and a temperamental radio. There was no support boat and no chase plane — only Mr. Fairfax and the sea. He caught fish and sometimes boarded passing ships to cadge food, water and showers.

The long, empty days spawned a temporary madness. Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus.

On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore. Two years later, he was at it again.

This time Ms. Cook, a secretary and competitive rower he had met in London, was aboard. Their new boat, the Britannia II, also a Fox design, was about 36 feet long, large enough for two though still little more than a toy on the Pacific.

“He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren’t they?”

Their crossing, from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, took 361 days — from April 26, 1971, to April 22, 1972 — and was an 8,000-mile cornucopia of disaster.

“It was very, very rough, and our rudder got snapped clean off,” Ms. Cook said. “We were frequently swamped, and at night you didn’t know if the boat was the right way up or the wrong way up.”

Mr. Fairfax was bitten on the arm by a shark, and he and Ms. Cook became trapped in a cyclone, lashing themselves to the boat until it subsided. Unreachable by radio for a time, they were presumed lost.

For all that, Ms. Cook said, there were abundant pleasures. “The nights not too hot, sunny days when you could just row,” she recalled. “You just hear the clunking of the rowlocks, and you stop rowing and hear little splashings of the sea.”

Mr. Fairfax was often asked why he chose a rowboat to beard two roiling oceans. “Almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail,” he said in a profile on the Web site of the Ocean Rowing Society International, which adjudicates ocean rowing records. “I’m after a battle with nature, primitive and raw.”

Such battles are a young man’s game. With Ms. Cook, Mr. Fairfax went back to the Pacific in the mid-’70s to try to salvage a cache of lead ingots from a downed ship they had spied on their crossing. But the plan proved unworkable, and he never returned to sea.

In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.

Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.

I don't know where else to put this. Should I start a "favourite videos that are NOT YouTube" thread? I suppose it could have also gone into the happy thread...

Anyways, it's so beautiful I had to catch my breath, watch it a second time, and then post it here. Black-and-white footage of Saturn (mostly) and Jupiter (cameos) from NASA, combined with music by Cinematic Orchestra... who are simply amazing.

If you want drama to stop following you everywhere, try letting go of the leash.

“THEY’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!”“The Only E-Zine You Should Ever Bother To Read”DISCUSSION 72: I Am The Tard Whisperer

It never ceases to amaze me how much smarter I am and how much clearer the world becomes when I’m drunk. Though I recognize that you, kind readers, already understand that, much of society hangs on to age-old prejudices and continue to look down their collective noses at drunken sots. The point was driven home to me the other day when I was sitting at my local drinkery knocking back boilermakers while watching the NCAAs, and who should come wondering in? Why none other than Chris Burke. I know what you’re thinking: Who the fuck is Chris Burke? Maybe this will refresh your memory: Chris played the part of that retard with Downs Syndrome, Corky Thacher, in the truly awful TV show “Life Goes On”. Except he wasn’t acting. This drooling shithead actually has Downs Syndrome and should have been institutionalized rather than given his own primetime program. So I walk up to him and started hollering in his face that he’s a useless window-licking imbecile. He looked at me with these half-shut eyes and started whimpering something about intolerance or some such shit, but I seemed to be the only one that could actually understand him. Then it hit me: The reason I can understand him and nobody else can is because I must be the Tard Whisperer! It is that amazing revelation that this month’s enlightening discussion will address.

Being the Tard Whisperer is both a blessing and a curse. It’s not that people hunt me down to try and decipher what their retarded kids are trying to say, or to translate into English what the fuck their Alzheimers-stricken old lady is eluding to. Strangely that never seems to happen. No, it’s a blessing and a curse because now I find myself actually going out of my way to find tards and people who have fits all the time and do the world’s bidding and try and make sense from their collective gibberish. Trust me, I’d rather be drinking. But my calling is my calling, so I persevere. Just the other day I was hanging around the asylum when I saw several tards and their handlers playing tetherball. It was Goddamn frustrating trying to watch these Mongoloids trying to hit the fucking ball and get it to wrap around the pole. It just wasn’t happening. So I walked up, grabbed the ball out of this imbecile’s fat stubby hand, and proceeded to smash her in the face with it. Well, she immediately started crying so I got next to her and, between her sobs and deep painful asthmatic breaths began translating what she was saying to anyone who cared to listen.I looked at these cretin half-wits and told them what she told me. “This man is God and you should give him all your money.” As they started to throw dollar bills in my direction, the little girl said something else that needed translating to the gathering masses. “Go into the teacher’s lounge and grab the bottle of rum out of the cabinet. And bring me some pornography while you’re at it.” Several of them scampered off and I knew then and there that my work on this planet would never be done. But that’s a fucking cross I can bear. I would have thanked them for bringing that fifth of Myers, but these nitwits were so beneath me that never even occurred to me. Not to show off or anything, but when the security guards began to run over to me, I simply got in my car, hitting only one of the morons in my midst, and sped away. That’s what I call humble.

It’s sort of sad in a way that there aren’t more retards running around. I have found that people with Tourette’s aren’t really in need of my help. I mean, “Fuck you nigger” and “Blow me cunt” pretty much translate perfectly well all by themselves. But I continue to try. I have found that the Salvation Army center is a hotbed of retards, or at least the mentally ill which in some respects is even better. I found this one lady, probably no older than 25, who clearly was suffering from some profound mental disorder but who looked almost normal. It was time to weave my magic. I called her over to me, and draping my arm around her, listened to what she was trying to say. To the layman it sounded like, “Please take your hands off of me right now!” But I knew she meant “Turn me over and fuck me in the ass.” So I granted her wish. When she staggered off in something of a daze I knew I could hold my head high because I unselfishly helped another human being in need. My giving knows no end.

I like being the Tard Whisperer. Not only is it steady work there is little or no competition. You would have to be a real cocksucker to take advantage of these cretins, which is why I offer my services nearly free of charge. Just need to cover my overhead is all. Whenever I see some Mongoloid wandering aimlessly around I make sure to go over and slap some sense into him. Often I have found that shuts them up, which is good because they have trouble communicating with anybody except me anyway. I selflessly empty their wallets, pat them on their ever-expanding foreheads, and send them on their way. There is a special place in Heaven for people like me.

The point is made: There are certain jobs that don’t fit any natural category, and mine is clearly one of them. But communicating with the retarded and mentally challenged is a gift that must not be taken for granted. I will never fuck this up because I know they need me a hell of a lot more than I need them. I am, after all, The Tard Whisperer.